Urdu

Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language mainly used across South Asia. It serves as Pakistan’s national language and everyday common tongue, and in India it is recognized as an Eighth Schedule language under the Constitution, holding official status in states including Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, and both Telugu states.

Urdu and Hindi are closely linked, sharing a core vocabulary rooted in Sanskrit and Prakrit, along with similar sounds, sentence structure, and grammar. This makes them mutually understandable in casual conversation. Their shared foundation is often called Hindi–Urdu or Hindustani, with Urdu considered a Persian-influenced formal version of Hindustani. In formal settings, Urdu pulls its literary, political, and technical terms from Persian and Arabic, while Hindi draws from Sanskrit, so the two become less mutually intelligible as formality increases.

Urdu first emerged in the upper Ganga-Yamuna doab, around the Delhi region, where the local dialect Khari Boli was spoken. It kept Khari Boli’s grammar but adopted a modified Perso-Arabic script and borrowed vocabulary from Persian and Arabic, preserving those languages’ original grammatical structures. In 1837, during British East India Company rule, Urdu replaced Persian as an official language across northern India—Persian had previously been the court language of various Indo-Islamic empires.

According to 2026 estimates from Ethnologue, Urdu ranks as the 10th most widely spoken language globally, with 246 million total speakers, including second-language users.

The name “Urdu” was first used around 1780 by the Indian poet Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi, though he also employed the term “Hindavi” in his poetry for the same language. “Ordu” means “army” in Turkic languages. In the late 1700s, the language was called *Zaban-e-Urdu-e-Mualla*, meaning “language of the exalted camp.” Earlier, it was known by names such as Hindvi, Hindi, Hindustani, and Rekhta.

Urdu belongs to the Hindi–Urdu linguistic continuum, commonly called Hindustani today. Some linguists trace its earliest forms to the medieval Apabhraṃśa register of Shauraseni, a Middle Indo-Aryan language that also gave rise to other modern Indo-Aryan tongues. In the Delhi area, the native language was Khariboli, whose early form is known as Old Hindi (or Hindavi), part of the Western Hindi group of Central Indo-Aryan languages. The mingling of Hindu and Muslim cultures during Muslim conquests in the subcontinent (12th to 16th centuries) produced Hindustani as a product of the composite Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb.

In cities like Delhi, Old Hindi began absorbing many Persian loanwords and continued to be called “Hindi,” and later “Hindustani.” An early literary tradition of Hindavi was established by Amir Khusrau in the late 1200s, often called the father of Urdu literature. After the conquest of the Deccan and the migration of noble Muslim families south, a form of the language flourished in medieval India as a poetic medium, especially under the Bahmanids, known as Dakhini, which includes loanwords from Telugu and Marathi.

From the 1200s to the late 1700s, the language now called Urdu was referred to as Hindi, Hindavi, Hindustani, Dehlavi, Dihlawi, Lahori, and Lashkari. The Delhi Sultanate made Persian its official language in India, a policy continued by the Mughal Empire, which ruled most of northern South Asia from the 1500s to the 1700s and deepened Persian influence on Hindustani.

According to the *Navadirul Alfaz* by Khan-i Arzu, the “Zaban-e Urdu-e Shahi” (language of the Imperial Camp) gained special importance during the reign of Alamgir. By the end of Aurangzeb’s rule in the early 1700s, the common language around Delhi began to be called *Zaban-e-Urdu*, from the Turkic word *ordu* (army) or *orda*, meaning “language of the camp” or “Lashkari Zaban” (language of the army), though “Urdu” had different meanings at the time. Records show Aurangzeb spoke in Hindvi, likely Persianized, with evidence that Hindvi was written in the Persian script during this period.

European writers of the time referred to Urdu as “Moors,” simply meaning Muslim. John Ovington wrote in 1689 that the Moors’ language differed from that of India’s ancient inhabitants but borrowed letters from the “Gentiles” (Hindus), Persians, or other nations, as it lacked its own script. In 1715, Nawab Sadruddin Khan wrote a complete literary *Diwan* in Rekhta. Khan-i Arzu compiled an Urdu-Persian dictionary in 1751 under Ahmad Shah Bahadur. The name “Urdu” was first introduced by Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi around 1780. As a literary language, Urdu developed in courtly, elite settings, keeping the grammar and core Indo-Aryan vocabulary of Khariboli while adopting the Perso-Arabic writing system in the Nastaleeq calligraphic style.